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Last updated: 26/10/2000 12:21:20 AM
I have been an avid gardener for about the last fifteen years, beginning with pots and hanging baskets on high-rise balconies and gradually working my way down to earth, and then across the water to a hobby-farm on Gabriola Island where I was steward, for eight years, to 5.5 acres of forests and meadow and gardens of about an acre. These days I am back in the city, making a tiny garden around our new home in the Trout Lake area of Vancouver. We have a huge, huge deck that gets incredibly hot in the summer (perfect for growing herbs and all the plants I'd grow if I lived in California, as I often feel I should) and a little front yard that is mostly lawn and unkempt roses, facing East 12th Ave., a very busy street, and a tiny strip in the back yard, which has mostly been paved over to hold six cars (why would one want to?).
It's a bit of a change and, while I loved gardening on Gabriola and all the relationships I had there with serious gardeners, I am enjoying this challenge - a rented house and not much space to play with... still, I seem to have amassed a couple of hundred plants!
Thomas Hobbs' Southlands Nursery is about my favourite place to spend a Sunday afternoon with my partner, wandering around and introducing him to a wealth of plants that catch the eye and are relatively easy to grown. Mr Hobbs' is a great collector of hardy plants and garden ephemera.
Some days I think I'd like to live in San Francisco, just so I could be a volunteer at the Strybing Arboretum, where I spent a few of the happiest days of my life thus far...
You can find out just about anything about any plant at The Garden Gate
For about seven years, I had a great working relationship with The Coastal Grower magazine, now called The British Columbia Gardener magazine, writing features and book reviews. I got distracted by studies in homeopathy, but look forward to returning to writing about gardens soon.
I love growing medittarean plants. To find out more about them, consider joining a virtual or real-life group. Here's a garden I've wanted to visit for years.
To read some of my garden writing, check out: